Letters As Symbols, launched on Kickstarter, is based on Belgian graphic design pioneer Paul Ibou's collection of an unseen archive of logos designed by the leading designers of the 60s until the 80s. The book features more than 400 logos, 75 corporate identities, 120 books and catalogs, 250 posters and 350 packages.
While working as graphic designer, Ibou founded the International Trademark Center (ITC). With ITC, Ibou created an immense archive on logos designed by all the leading designers of that era, such as: Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Wim Crouwel, Jozef-Müller Brockmann, Yasaburo Kuwayama, Ken Cato, Eduardo A. Cánovas, Félix Beltràn and many others.
In 1991, Ibou built the foundations of the book 'Letters As Symbols.' Letters are among the most recognizable symbols in the human language. It is one of the fundamental ways we communicate. The book needed to celebrate the alphabet in all its matters. There is only one letter of each in the Latin alphabet, but Ibou wanted to visually document all its possible interpretations depending on how the letters were designed.
However, the book was never released and remained untouched for decades until Christophe De Pelsemaker met Ibou in June 2017. The original submissions were carefully reproduced and used in the creation of the book. Other existing elements like the cover, colors and the layout were already designed and defined by Paul Ibou in 1991. These were adopted, adjusted and manually digitized to ensure the highest quality.
